TheVat

Good post: helpful. Seems more useful when one goes with gender based on descriptive criteria rather than causal ones - on observed phenotypic patterns rather than on the underlying causal process. Those patterns are an ongoing interaction with the environment it seems. And our present environment has gotten really strange, at this point in the Anthropocene.

Just called a spherical wave isn't it? Or maybe one could elaborate and say spherical wave originating at the pole of a sphere. If we were on Waterworld, Kevin Costner could drop a big rock in the ocean at one pole and the wave would travel in the manner described in the OP (in real world, obv, it would be disrupted by other currents and Coriolis).

Think about the handheld leaf rake. Steady improvements for a few centuries and then....Perfect for its job, quiet, low-maintenance, lightweight, fuel-less. Not every technology must necessarily keep advancing rapidly. Some plateau. Wiki "mature technology."

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Well that all makes sense, but then why are you participating in this thread? Clearly the fate of the biosphere is not critically dependent on inclusion rules in sports. It feels like you want to have the discussion but want to dismiss the issues. This thread is located in Biology, so I took it to be about the physiology of trangender folks and how that interacts with their engaging in sports. I was not weighing its importance relative to the issues of human survival and sustainable society. I was just curious about people who have made choices of self-identification that are quite different from mine. (mine can be accessed via Eric Idle's The Penis Song)

@mistermack I think I've seen that spot in your pic. On west edge of metro Denver? It had a different joke on the sign when we drove through there.

Thanks, I think the way this was quoted was what initially led to my surprise, because it made it sound like the stat was about severe conditions. Yes, once you include all with managed hypertension, asthma, common conditions of aging like osteoarthritis (something like 25-30 percent of population), and those who have had an extended period of depression, then that figure makes sense and could even be on the low side.

Seems to have some parallels to the Baltimore Affair, back in the late 80s. Cell biologist David Baltimore also resigned from the presidency of a university, was also connected to a researcher who had been accused of falsifying data (though she was later exonerated IIRC), was also criticized for not retracting a paper when irregularities came to light. It's been problem for decades, and medical fields are especially prone to such problems, with all the corporate pressures to find treatments in lucrative areas of research.

I thought several of your observations - the broadness of their category, the profit-focused trend in healthcare, the differentials between regions and socioeconomic groups, and the aging population - all helpful in understanding this lamentable stat. Also the aggressive marketing of cheap junk food. (go to France, hang with the locals, and try snacking on a bag of cheezits - they will emit horrified noises and toss you in the nearest river)(and if you eat lots of junk food you you will float easily) I've seen stark contrasts myself between states. When I'm in the Colorado front range, for example, it's really noticeable how thin and fit people look, compared to rural western Kansas and Nebraska, a couple hundred miles away. In Colorado, lots of bikes and bike trails, lots of hikers, lots of healthy food stores, great variety of outdoor activities, etc. IOW, a fitness oriented culture, and people who move there to be part of it. I saw this statistical study by state, of rates of multiple chronic conditions and found huge differences, with Arkansas at 60.5% and Colorado at 42%. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7199953/ Interesting that DC was the lowest, at 38%. (which may relate to factors like more walkable neighborhoods, quality healthcare, young healthy people who move there to work government jobs and then move away when older, etc)

If it's infinity how does it have an edge? - respectfully yours, Buzz Lightyear Seems like "geek Rapture" ideas always get some hard scrutiny at science forums. The question remains of whether a snapshot of a connectome is merely a recording of memories or an actual transfer of consciousness. I would posit that this uncertainty would make the initial pool of experiment volunteers really small. YMMV.

This CDC stat I saw recently in a news article was a bit of a shock. https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/index.htm "Six in ten Americans live with at least one chronic disease, like heart disease and stroke, cancer, or diabetes." This number really doesn't line up with my own experiences, with a variety of social and work circles in five different states, so clearly I have had sampling errors and perceptual filters that led me to think that number would be lower. Either that, or the statistic presented has been tinkered with in some misleading way. (if that figure was describing, say, all adults over fifty, I would find it easier to swallow)

Glad to hear that! I visited The Naked Scientists forum (UK based) for a little while a couple years ago. It was well-run, but I preferred SFN for its wide range of discussions and transparent structure. As for the evil twin website (scienceforums.com), best to avoid. I'm sure some here have visited there by accident when they were on a different computer and had to type in the URL. It is a shithole.

Phoenix, your paint has arrived.

I encounter this argument against a variety of reforms. The underlying logic seems to be that only some kinds of problems are worth solving. E.g. let's withdraw money for treating depression, because they're fine physically and other people are starving or sick. They should just grow a pair and quit whining. You see the flaw there? Just because you don't experience a certain category of suffering doesn't mean it's not a real problem for someone else. Human life can't be reduced to one short menu of problems. If I send money to the Nature Conservancy, it's because preserving wild lands is important to me and I believe it's critical to keeping the planet sustainable, it doesn't mean I don't care about discrimination or food insecurity or malaria.

That last line, from his Princeton roommate, was pretty funny. Thanks for sharing that. @John Cuthber

IIRC, a character created by a writer is part of their intellectual property and cannot be used by other writers without permission. The exception is when the copyright is expired. Anyone can use a Jane Austen character, or Captain Ahab.

What are your specific criteria for being (still) male? Not sure I've seen these in a post here in this thread. As for posting opinion polls, that is what Americans in some online forums call shouting "scoreboard!" The science of gender is not determined by popular opinion.

You have misread me. The nirvana point was quite opposite to a virtual space of infinite experience. It was a conjecture (hardly an "argument") that a consciousness in such a virtual space might reach a point where no further experience was necessary and so would not suffer from the finite menu of experience available to it. I was pointing to our present limited knowledge of what such a being might consider a bliss, not stating that the conjecture was inevitable. It is a possibility I felt worth considering that a being, in the fullness of time would achieve a kind of contentment and cease to see new states as its source of meaning. This is, it should be noted, a philosophy section, so an eschatological meander is permitted. If not of interest to you, that's quite okay, and I am happy to discuss other aspects of the OP questions. (see also my earlier post, above, about the possible evolution of AI to systems that incorporate both digital and analog processes, which could somewhat shift the limits)

Those of you who persist with this discussion are as hardy as tardigrades. Impressive stamina. The question of free choice probably would thrive more in a philosophy thread, is my guess. Part of the feeling of choice is the awareness of having one. It is probably more likely that, prior to sexual reassignment treatments, most humans tended to see their gender as locked in and would therefore be more likely to find ways to adjust to that, however awkwardly. This spectrum of choice growing is also seen in various medical limitations: when a surgery or medicine came along that could keep someone from being an invalid or confined to a wheelchair, the perception of choice changed and people tended to choose the medical intervention that allowed them the most unrestricted participation in the life around them. As Joseph Campbell et al have pointed out, for most of human history mythology was used as a metaphorical path to go in search of one's true inner nature and be that in the world. It might be that our present culture will evolve new mythologies, allegories, legends, etc. that can help with that journey, side by side with medical procedures. And there may be ancient ones that are revived, also, for that purpose of getting past dyphoria in one's body.

And I have neglected to point out that the brain has elements of both digital and analog operation. So the digital computer and its limitations can become something of a FSM Straw Man in these discussions. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(06)01825-2.pdf https://news.yale.edu/2006/04/12/brain-communicates-analog-and-digital-modes-simultaneously ETA: editor chopped off my last comment: Good point, Genady. The change in sequence introduces infinite variety.

Several assumptions here. One, that present digital-only computer architecture is all there will be. Maybe, who knows? Two, that no platform could support continuous cycles of self improvement. After millions of such cycles, who knows? We are speaking of possibilities beyond our present lives as apes with cellphones. There could be eons of growing wisdom leading to some kind of cyber-nirvana that no one could describe to a 21st century human. How can you rule, from this limited perspective, that there aren't information densities that would render a profound and blissful satisfaction in simple contemplation?

I'm not a member of Twitter. Posts are open to read AFAIK in most countries. If it contains "sensitive" material, I think you can just click a permission button to choose to remove the block. It may be different in the UK, though. See my reply to John. Thank you, @Phi for All

Internal combustion operates on the scale of atoms interacting, especially hydrogen, carbon and oxygen atoms. Automobiles are too macro for this. 😏

Not mutually exclusive.